The Goddess Rambles

I think my child is possessed of a demon. Or maybe she’s just a toddler. But I’m leaning toward demon. The Demon of Making Mom Eat Humble Pie.

See, my oldest, Ella, is honestly the sweetest, most compliant child on the face of the earth. She never went through the Terrible Twos. She never threw a tantrum, not once, ever. I think one time she thought about it and then I gave her “the look” and she stopped. Instantly. Seriously. The most grievous and/ or punishable thing she’s ever done was to cut her own hair when she was 6. Now, you might be thinking (especially if you’re female) that I’m a cruel and horrible mother for punishing her for that, considering we’ve ALL done it. Give a 6 year old a pair of safety scissors and a haircut is not far behind. But the punishment wasn’t so much for self-styling.

It was for SCARING ME TO DEATH.

One night, Ella was playing in her room, or so I thought. My pregnant behind was on the sofa watching Charmed and trying not to be sick (not because of Charmed). Quite suddenly I realized it was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that, when you have a child whose “inside voice” regularly exceeds the legal residential sound limit, signals that something is very, very wrong.

I hauled my whale-like frame off of the sofa and went to check. On my way back through the hall, I noticed long chunks of something shimmery on the carpet. I bent to pick them up (no small feat, I assure you) and realized.. OMG, that’s Ella’s HAIR. HER HAIR IS FALLING OUT IN CHUNKS. Which obviously means she has some horrible type of cancer and it’s already advanced because we didn’t catch it quickly enough and now her hair is falling out in CHUNKS! I must have picked up at least a dozen HUGE CHUNKS of hair on the way to her room, clammy fear and dread growing with every single one.

By the time I got to her room, I was a mess. I mean, a terrified, teary mess. The first thing I noticed upon opening her door was that her ENTIRE ROOM was covered in chunks of hair. I think I let out a sob. And then I saw her. She was poised ,mid-haircut, on her bed, scissors in one hand, hair in the other, with a look of utter terror on her face. Her hair had been at least a foot long, and now she looked like Robin Tunney having a psychotic episode in Empire Records.

I laughed. I kid you not. I laughed until I cried. And then I told her she couldn’t watch TV for two weeks and would have to use her allowance to pay for a haircut. Because I had never been so terrified in my entire life as I was picking up all that hair.

For a good 6 months she looked like one of our older sister’s Barbies after we’d been secretly playing “beauty shop” with them in our closets and then tried to return them like nothing had happened (oh, come on, you know you did it, too).

Now she’s 9 and will occasionally be a little sassy or throw an eye-roll in when she thinks I’m not looking. Even the Haircut of Doom didn’t involve an ounce of bad attitude and was done more out of a feminine desire for a new hairstyle (understandable, says the woman with Bettie Page bangs) than any latent anger management issues.

Of course, I had chalked all of this sweetness and light up to my impeccable parenting. Obviously, my supremely well-behaved child was solely the product of my superior knack for child-rearing. Right? Right?

And then there was Anna. Who has been angry since the day she was born. Probably before she was born, come to think of it. She’s also funny and loving and adorable and her laugh is like puppies and rainbows and sunshine. But when she gets angry, she gets angry. Hell hath no fury like Anna denied.

It started out as just so much loud crying. Can’t have a cookie? CRY! Don’t want to go night night? CRY! Don’t like that Daddy just ate our last Cheese Nip? CRY, and for a good, long stretch.

I had hoped that would be the extent of it. “Surely”, I thought, “A child of mine will eventually wise up and stop this nonsense. For I am the superior parent of well-behaved children!”

And now I am the parent of a demon possessed toddler.

Today, she threw a tantrum. And I don’t mean a “cry and stomp your foot” kind of tantrum. I don’t even mean a “cry, stomp your foot and shake your fists God-ward” kind of tantrum. I mean a full on Joan-Crawford-over-wire-hangers TANTRUM.

We have a daybed upstairs that we’ve turned backward against the wall so she can’t climb on it and fall off. When she began this pissy-fit, the Husband placed her little butt on the mattress and told her, “time OUT.” At first, it was the typical crying and yelling (I swear if I could translate those cries, they’d be NSFW).

And then, Dear Reader, it grew.

My child began to flail, and then to toss her head around like an augmented chick in an 80’s hair band video, and then to THROW HERSELF on the mattress. Repeatedly. And with force. And then she’d lie there and arch her back and let out the most ungodly sound known to man. It sounded like a wolverine in a blender. And then she’d stop for a second to see if we were watching. Then she’d stand up, jump up and down while doing the head-tossing thing, and throw herself down again.

This went on for 20. Freaking. Minutes.

Now, you may be asking why we didn’t pick her up or try a distraction technique or try some, I don’t know, chamomile oil or something… The truth is, I simply didn’t know what to do. Because I had never experienced fury such as this. I was in awe of it, the way I am in awe of hurricanes and tsunamis and forest fires.

Finally, I said, “Anna! Anna! Do you want to go night night?” God knows, it was a reach. It could’ve escalated the whole thing and I might have wound up with full head rotation and pea soup. But she, to my shock, stopped cold and said, “Yes.”

So I put her to bed. And then I crossed myself and prayed she wouldn’t find a way to sneak out of her crib in the night and find where we sleep.

Sometimes I think God is laughing at me.